Joomla templates and offshore programming.

It's been about 2 years since I started focusing more and more on Joomla as a CMS and as one of Sagewing's core services. These days, about 50% of our services income is coming from Joomla development and maintenance and there's no end in sight! However, there is one gap in Joomla's functionality that has yet to be neatly filled and that is the lack of a built-in blogging component.

Of course, with no shortage of 3rd party components available for Joomla, it's no problem to piece together a blogging platform and that's exactly what we've done:

• A standard category in Joomla was created for blogging, and sub-categories added as usual. So, the blog is essentially just running as a collection of Joomla articles.
• The DS-Syndicate component was added to handle our RSS feeds. This component allows us to elect which categories go into the feed, and appears to cleanly carry html right into the feed. The component is available at www.joomlafun.com.
• The comments are handled by the JomComment component which as available at www.azrul.com. These excellent programmers provide great support and the component is well written and stable.
• Still missing is a way to allow people to digg or otherwise put an entry onto the many social bookmarking sites. We'll be adding this in once we component selected.

To be fair, there are a few blogging components available for Joomla but these are fairly new and, in our opinion, not quite ready for prime-time. There is also the classic bridge to Wordpress, which is enticing but it just doesn't seem like a good idea to introduce an entirely new application just to handle the blogging.

With more and more clients asking 'how to I do a blog in Joomla' we'll be interested to see how the blog really performs as we add more and more content. Hopefully we'll get some good feedback from our handful of readers se if we can polish up this approach. Your comments welcome!

Comments (1)